The Christian World of C. S. Lewis

Clyde S. Kilby

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan

© 1964 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

255 Jefferson Ave. S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503

All rights reserved

Library of Congress catalog card number, 64-16590

ISBN 0-8028-0871-9

To C. K. B.

PREFACE

It was almost a quarter century ago that I picked up at my college book store a little volume by an Oxford don named C. S. Lewis. It was called The Case for Christianity, and when I sat down to read it I realized that a new planet had sailed into my ken. Unlike Lewis when he discovered the works of George Macdonald, I felt neither holiness nor Joy in this book—these were to appear later—but a mind sharp as a scalpel and as intent as a surgeon upon the separation of the diseased from the healthy. I discovered a writer who like a philosopher claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living, yet who with the humblest Christian gave that life a Living Center. My impression was of a man who had won, inside and deep, a battle against pose, evasion, expedience, and the ever-so-little lie and who wished with all his heart to honor truth in every idea passing through his mind. And now, some forty books later, I have no reason to change my basic impression of the man.

There are critics who accuse Lewis of word-juggling and a diabolical cleverness used to promote what they call an outdated fundamentalism. Some dismiss him as little more than a popularizer. I think he would willingly have acceded to the charge if popularizer is meant in its original sense of one who hopes to influence (for good) the mass of ordinary people. Lewis himself speaks of “the divine popularizer Boethius.” But the charge is by no means applicable to him if it means the entertainment of the vulgar, the cheapening of values to win a clientele, or the effort to pad one’s pockets. The truth is that Lewis holds up a higher standard of literary discipline than most writers and a higher standard of Christian discipleship than most clergymen—standards which bespeak the very antithesis of popularization.

As a derisive term, popularizer may be intended to indicate someone deficient in knowledge but glib in style, someone incapable of original thought who is nevertheless clever in rephrasing and illustrating the ideas of his betters. Lewis’s reputation as a scholar in realms other than religion provides evidence of his vigorous intellectual originality. As to style, Lewis is undoubtedly a master. D. S. Savage declares that a great writer discovers that method which is precisely suited to himself and to his subject and actually creates a vehicle for his unique purpose. Any sensitive reader becomes aware of this quality in Lewis, not alone in the fictional works where metaphor, allegory, symbol, and myth are used but also in the seemingly opposite style of some of Lewis’s expository prose which, despite its apparently unstudied directness, turns out on examination to be filled with strength ...